how can u contribute that to human interaction? based on scientists that was turned up to 350 million years ago....long before man was on the Earth. not that i believe that or the scientists. I do however believe we are impacting our oceans and reefs today with the import/export trade of the saltwater hobby. personally i buy ORA or at the very least MAC stuff long before anything just 'wild' caught. my lil footprint is small compared to the masses but at least its a start.I can't believe what people did to the giant reef that used to cover death valley, and the one that used to cover the alps was equally magnificent.. the travesty of it all. and the poor poor Megaladon. freaking global warming and overfishing.
The ancient reefs you reference developed and were destroyed by natural processes over vast geologic time. The destruction wrought by humans will probably be meaningless after humans finally vanish and the planet heals as it slowly changes. New landforms, new oceans, new species evolving, new reefs, all of these things will happen. Of course, it will take millions of years, and it is unlikely that any human eye will see these changes. In the meantime, the once rich natural world that existed when I was a boy is substantially gone.
Our individual lives are only a tiny speck of time, but that's all we have. The restructuring of the planet will continue to occur slowly, and the damage people have done will endure for the relatively short period humans continue to exist. The planet eventually will shrug off the damage, but that is cold comfort to those of us who miss what once was, however ephemeral we and the world as we know it may be.
Measuring man's impact on the Earth is what makes us think we have an impact.Man's ego is what makes him think he has any impact on the earch whatsoever.
That means a whole lot to the world's oceans as nearly as we can tell. That 3% is on top of a system that was already roughly in equilibrium with the other 97%- i.e. if it weren't for the oceans capacity to take up about half of our 3% addition we would be out of balance by 3%. That means about 1.5% of the CO2 produced every year now accumulates in the atmosphere while about half of what we produce every year goes into the oceans, shifting the carbonate buffer system towards bicarbonate. Last time similar chemical changes happened, it meant the end of all reefbuilding for several million years, the extinction of one of the main groups of reef-builders, and the near-extinction of corals (they essentially disappear from the fossil record at that time). That meant a whole lot to the ocean's ecosystems.Mankind is responsible for a measley 3% of the total amount of Co2 that gets injected into the atmosphere, and as nearly as we can tell that means nothing to the world's oceans.
We also regulate alkalinity in our tanks. The ocean doesn't except on geologic timescales.Most of us can't even control the CO2 injection into our tanks to an accuracy of 3%, yet our captive reefs still manage to thrive.
I think you seriously misunderstand how we know about the impacts we're having. For one, we're not just spotting trends over a few years and assuming we're the cause.We're making claims that we're doing something to the earth's closed system based on what we see over such a short period of time, and the truth is we have no idea what, if any, impact we're having. It's like trying to predict a nascar race when you get a 2 second long video clip somewhere in the middle of it.
Measuring man's impact on the Earth is what makes us think we have an impact.
That means a whole lot to the world's oceans as nearly as we can tell. That 3% is on top of a system that was already roughly in equilibrium with the other 97%- i.e. if it weren't for the oceans capacity to take up about half of our 3% addition we would be out of balance by 3%. That means about 1.5% of the CO2 produced every year now accumulates in the atmosphere while about half of what we produce every year goes into the oceans, shifting the carbonate buffer system towards bicarbonate. Last time similar chemical changes happened, it meant the end of all reefbuilding for several million years, the extinction of one of the main groups of reef-builders, and the near-extinction of corals (they essentially disappear from the fossil record at that time). That meant a whole lot to the ocean's ecosystems.
We also regulate alkalinity in our tanks. The ocean doesn't except on geologic timescales.
I think you seriously misunderstand how we know about the impacts we're having. For one, we're not just spotting trends over a few years and assuming we're the cause.
We'll stick to CO2 for example. How do we know it's causing a problem and that we're to blame? For one, we know that the ocean is acidifying from the top down, which immediately rules out undersea sources like volcanoes and tells us the input is from the top of the ocean. Then we can measure the isotopic signature of that carbon in the upper layers of the ocean. The carbon from burning fossil fuels is chemically different from carbon sources like volcanoes and decaying plants. When you measure that isotopic ratio in the oceans, it shows that the main contributor of additional carbon is the burning of fossil fuels. It's not coming from the decay of plants or from volcanoes, and since we're the only major source of fossil fuel combustion, we can trace that carbon in the oceans back to humans based on its fingerprint.
We've also worked backwards and measured the increase in CO2 in the air and calculated how much CO2 will dissolve in seawater and the effects that will have on the carbonate chemistry based on the concentration in the air. These are a very straightforward set of equations that you can solve without even using a calculator if you have to (I had to do it when I took marine chem). These same equations have served oceanographers well for close to a century now, so we know they work. The answers from those equations tells us how things should change in the ocean if increasing atmospheric CO2 is the source, and those predictions match the real-world measurements.
We know that those changes are a problem because we can measure their effects in microcosm- highly controlled closed systems. We can for example, pump carefully controlled amounts of CO2 into the air above a sealed aquarium full of coral and see what happens to them. Except in a few experiments where alkalinity is artificially kept constant, their calcification slows and eventually stops. To rule out the possibility that there's some mechanism that we can't reproduce in an aquarium that would counteract that effect we also look at prehistoric reefs to see what happened to them when the ocean's chemistry changed. We can measure things like the ratio of magnesium and calcium in their skeletons and the form of CaCO3 (calcite or aragonite) they produced and determine the chemistry of the water they grew in. What we see are several periods where there is high pH and aragonite is favored. When atmospheric CO2 increases and the pH drops, we see species that produce aragonite disappear, sometimes being replaced by calcitic species. Other times, things get bad enough that aragonitic and calcitic species both largely disappear, which tells us that the abundance and makeup of reefs is closely tied to seawater chemistry just like in our microcosms.
Similar work was done just down the coast in Egypt, and IIRC it's been done in Belize and the Cayman Islands as well, though I don't know if it's resulted in increased regulation in any of those places.
It's ego that makes us think we can affect such a large system for the positive or negative.
I am hearing all the problems, I am not hearing any solutions?